This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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For Remainers radicalised by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, it is a surprise that our anguished debates about whether to join in or stand back from European integration has in fact gone on for decades.

There are few things more important than high politics, but one of them, as Bill Shankly would attest, is football

In 1950, Winston Churchill used a Commons debate to needle Clement Attlee for refusing to contemplate joining the Schuman Plan, which led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union. A year later, Churchill was back in Number Ten, yet showed no interest in doing what he had previously demanded of Attlee. British concerns about supranationalism and national sovereignty always ran deep.

There are few things more important than high politics, but one of them, as Bill Shankly would attest, is football. And here while British, or more accurately, English, engagement with Europe has been more positive than in politics, that does not mean relations — and indeed big decisions — have been any easier for those who run our national sport.

UEFA — the Union of the European Football Associations — was born surprisingly late, in Basel in 1954. This was 50 years after the creation of FIFA — the Fédération Internationale de Football Association — which had been established by a group of seven European football associations in Zurich in 1904. The British had not been present to witness the birth of FIFA, but unlike with Europe’s Schuman Plan, they made it into the room for UEFA’s arrival.

Europe was always the heart of world football, and from the 1950s it was always beating faster. The first European
Championships were played in 1960, although England, Italy and West Germany did not participate, and the teams included had to be changed when Francoist Spain refused to travel to the Soviet Union and had to be replaced by Communist Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless the momentum was set. The Championships grew, and England finally showed up, as world champions, in 1968.

Before the Championships — or the European Nations’ Cup, as it was first called — came European club competition. As early as 1954, some claimed Wolverhampton Wanderers (yes, really) were the “world club champions” after they beat Spartak Moscow and Budapest Honvéd in succession. But in 1956, the real deal arrived, and the first European Cup — like the subsequent four European Cups — was won by Real Madrid.

It was almost a decade following readmittance before an English team won the Champions League

The European Fairs Cup — which began in 1955 and was planned to coincide with trade fairs — gave way to the UEFA Cup, for teams that finished high up the table in their domestic leagues but were not champions. With the Fairs Cup out, teams like Birmingham City would need to qualify on the basis of their performances, not the industry of their supporters, and so grotesque mismatches such as Blues v Barcelona (1955-58 and 1958-60) were sadly not repeated in the age of meritocracy.

Before long, English clubs would dominate. In the years between 1975 and 1985 there were only two occasions when an English club did not make the European Cup final. English sides won seven finals in those years, including six in a row between 1977 and 1982: Liverpool, Liverpool, Forest, Forest, Aston Villa and Liverpool.

Catastrophe soon struck, however, and British football found itself ejected from European competition. Football hooliganism had been a growing problem through the 1970s and 80s, not just in England, but across Europe, though English thugs seemed the worst offenders on the road. In 1985, the Heysel disaster left 39 fans dead and English clubs were banned from European competition for the next five years.

It would take years for English football to regain its place at the top of the European game. It was almost a decade following readmittance before an English team — Manchester United — won the Champions League, as the European Cup was now called. And even then, subsequent English successes were only spasmodic.

But through this time a change was underway in English football. After the Hillsborough tragedy, stadiums were modernised. The breakaway Premier League proved highly successful at selling broadcasting rights. Slowly and then suddenly the best players in Europe and then the wider world were drawn to England.

Reforms to clubs’ academy systems saw better homegrown players emerge through the ranks. The distribution of broadcasting revenues — fairer than in leagues such as Spain’s — made for a more competitive and therefore interesting league. Now the world’s billionaires — not all of them deeply unethical people — own English clubs and pump in even more cash.

The result is that the Premier League is Europe’s — or more accurately, the world’s — super league. The world’s players want to play here, and the world’s fans want to watch them. They pay well to do so.

It is little surprise then that the biggest clubs in Europe — many heavily indebted — look on with envy and want to hit back. The proposal for a closed-shop European Super League, with no promotion or relegation, and including some English clubs, was killed off two years ago. But the idea lives on. New proposals, featuring more teams and promotion and relegation, remain on the table.

The question facing some Premier League clubs is like that facing Clement Attlee in 1950. Do they join in something their own fans hate, and try to keep control? Or do they let the Europeans go ahead without them? A new super league is undoubtedly a threat to the international dominance of the Premier League. But English football should remain confident in the super league it has built for itself.